Oh, I really wish I could. There's an existing setup that I have to decode and understand so that I can troubleshoot. It may, in fact, be most of the issue. Now that I have Exchange out of the way, the backup mess is my next to-do. Currently there's some custom mess in there, I only got general info on it. Apparently it backs up the SBS to an external hard disk, and deltas were mentioned, so it may be incremental. There's also some black box magic going on which uses the backup to make a VM, I'm told, and the backup and/or VM is being periodically uploaded to offsite storage.

We just finished a big project this week, changed colos for the production servers, so I'm hoping I'll have more time to dig into the SBS issues.

That process sounds very much like an MSP style backup. I know products like Zenith, ShadowProtect, etc that can do forever incrementals, roll them up, create VMs on the fly automatically, as well as upload offsite.

Might be useful info there. He's got a links page but it seems to be missing at the moment. The links mainly pointed to MS articles on SBS though MS tends to move junk around so many links were broken. I gave him a heads up so it might be in the process of being updated, dunno.

Oh, I really wish I could. There's an existing setup that I have to decode and understand so that I can troubleshoot. It may, in fact, be most of the issue. Now that I have Exchange out of the way, the backup mess is my next to-do. Currently there's some custom mess in there, I only got general info on it. Apparently it backs up the SBS to an external hard disk, and deltas were mentioned, so it may be incremental. There's also some black box magic going on which uses the backup to make a VM, I'm told, and the backup and/or VM is being periodically uploaded to offsite storage.

We just finished a big project this week, changed colos for the production servers, so I'm hoping I'll have more time to dig into the SBS issues.

That process sounds very much like an MSP style backup. I know products like Zenith, ShadowProtect, etc that can do forever incrementals, roll them up, create VMs on the fly automatically, as well as upload offsite.

I was thinking the same, though I have to wonder if the guy did some kind of roll your own approach to this. Zenith obviously runs on a box of its own but shadow protect, appassure or any of those offerings could definitely cause this kind of performance issue if it's improperly configured (like every 15 minutes it's doing some kind of backup, rollup and conversion). That or he is doing this kind of thing to workstations from the server throughout the day.

Forge - If you find any backup programs installed on the server let us know, we may be able to help point you in the right direction.

Tachyonic Karma: Future decisions traveling backwards in time to smite you now.

Once you've done a migration over to 2008 R2, you'll probably want to loop back and clean out a lot of the GPOs that SBS puts in place, and restructure ADUC a bit. Nothing critical, but I like to be tidy.

Speaking of which, how intrenched in GPO's and other network goodies is your current server? If its nothing other than a basic AD for logon, you could always just manually rebuild the 20-25 users. Just a suggestion as I found it easier than dealing with a migration and some of the left over/changed settings.

Pulling and re-adding 20-25 computers from the old domain to the new domain, migrating docs/settings from the old to new profiles, and anything else that comes up with it would turn out to be quite a lot more work.

... I have a fully functional 2008 R2 AD on my VMware machine with zero SQL servers), and pare down/remove Sharepoint and other "never planning to use that" features.

You have a box with VM capability? Dude - migrate everything there temporarily. You might even be able to do a complete filesystem copy and stand it up (after fixing some driver issues - that said, I make no promises. It's always been hit-or-miss for me. Linux is even more picky about moving from one platform to another). If VMWare doesn't cut it try VirtualBox.

That way you can free up the physical box to start a fresh install of 2008 R2.